Featured Adafruit Community Project

I have a weakness (some might even say a problem) of buying blinky things without a clear goal of what to do with them, but the holiday season is a great excuse to just make things blink without any practical outcome, so here we are. Not all of my blinky things worked out well on video and so they didn’t make the cut, but here’s a list of the stuff that appears… (from Adafruit!)

james wolf shared: “So I am working on a “Smart Garage Door Opener” idea that needed a simple reed switch to determine if the door was open or closed. Apparently both +RadioShack and +The Home Depot no longer sell them, so I took something that had a reed switch in it and removed the reed switch and 3D printed a nice case for the board with my Up Plus 2 3D printer after drawing it up in Sketchup. The Smart Garage Door idea uses an Arduino Uno and the +Adafruit Industries CC3000 wifi shield to securely open the door from anywhere. Its your basic IOT device with a smart webservice for control and an phone app. I will post more about that when its a little closer.” (read more)

Manuel Clément shared: “Claire turns 6 next month! Go makers! She is making cool twisty bracelets for her girlfriends twisting colored wires and connecting them, using shrink tubing so it looks smooth and clean. First time soldering. Her hands are steadier than mine!” (read more)

MakerBlock shared the latest progress with his DIY Tiny 3-Axis CNC powered by Adafruit Trinket: “I just got my Tiny 3-Axis CNC to work with the Adafruit Trinket (courtesy of Hackaday!). While it doesn’t yet work with the Adafruit Fake Serial, that’s my next goal. Join my drawing robot newsletter http://shor.tw/x6 to catch all the latest developments or check out my blog http://PlotterBot.com for detailed build instructions, wiring diagrams, and everything else you need to make one for yourself.” (read more)

tycen shared this great clock project for those of you RPi users with kids: “Here’s the problem: a) young kids don’t instinctively know how to tell time and b) young kids think that at the moment they wake up in the morning it must be, at that moment, time to be awake for the day. Even if it’s 5am and Mom and Dad want to sleep in until 7am. Ideally the solution would be to teach kids how to tell time and do math so they can understand that at 5am they still have two hours to sleep. Not to mention teaching them self discipline. But, failing that, we typically resort to putting the kid back to bed and hope they don’t wake up again for 2 hours. The more young kids you have (and I have a few) the more this solution doesn’t scale….” (read more)

Arthur Guy shared an overview of a product prototype he is working on: “…This is a hockey puck shaped glowing device which showed me the result of a series of tests run against a project I am working on. The tests are run by a service called Codeship and they provide a simple output with 3 possible states. These tests are run by multiple people working on the project so this light would represent the overall state of the code providing the team with a quick insight into the validity of the code.” Uses the Adafruit Trinket and NeoPixel Ring! (read more)

Lukasz Karluk shared HoloDecks that uses OpenFrameworks to create 3D-printable sculptures from sound: “HoloDecks is an umbrella project for a number of studies which focus on transforming sound through different mediums. This study begins with a custom application built in openFrameworks which visualises audio from a song by Oneohtrix Point Never, titled Zebra. The base shape chosen for the visualisation is a disc which has always been a ubiquitous shape associated with music storage formats such as compact discs and vinyl records. Audio data from the song displaces the geometry of the disc to create a swirly visual echo of the audios last few seconds. At any point in the visualisation, a snapshot of the generated 3d model can be taken. OpenFrameworks does a great job at exporting 3D models using the .ply format which then needs to be converted into .obj format so it can be printed with a Makerbot 3D printer. Up to this point, the sound has been transformed from pure audio data, into a software visualisation and then materialised into the real world using a 3D printer. A final transformation is undertaken by augmenting the 3D printed sound sculpture using a mobile device to see another layer of audio reactive visuals mapped to the object.” (read more)